Scholar Carol Anderson on the "anti-Blackness" coded into the Second Amendment

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

67% : Anderson draws a straight line from the racist history of the Second Amendment and its application to our society today where armed (and unarmed)
57% : So you get what you often consider as the guardians of the Second Amendment eagerly writing gun control legislation to ban the Black Panthers from openly carrying arms.
55% : Carol Anderson is likely to trigger a lot of people on the right with her book about the anti-Black history of the Second Amendment, "The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America.
55% : In your view from studying this, the primary reason for the Second Amendment was anti-Blackness.
55% : And so you've got racism just coursing through the Second Amendment.
53% : The key for the Second Amendment is the ability to have a militia to control Black people, to stop slave revolts and to keep Black people subjugated.
53% : And that disparity in what is a threat and not a threat is what is at the base of the Second Amendment.
52% : And so one of the things that you can see from this book, although I go back to the 17th century, the access that African Americans have to their rights does not change fundamentally when it comes to the Second Amendment, from being enslaved to being free Black to being a denizen -- which is that halfway land between enslaved and citizen -- to being emancipated to Jim Crow Black to post-civil rights African American.
51% : Including free Black people, who were presumably citizens and the Second Amendment said they could.
50% : From there, Anderson traces how for decades the Second Amendment only protected the right of white Americans to own guns.
50% : I want to start out with something you talk about in your book that I've never heard -- and I'm a lawyer -- the history behind the Second Amendment, how and why it was really written.
48% : That's the Second Amendment.
48% : I looked at how these so-called testaments to the Second Amendment -- "stand your ground" laws, open carry and basically the right to self-defense -- how those actually play out for the Black community.
47% : In her new book, Anderson, the chair of African American studies at Emory University, shares a history of the Second Amendment that few of us ever heard, arguing that it was included in the U.S. Constitution after demands by slave states for a constitutional right to form militias to put down slave revolts.
45% : Anderson details how Virginia's Patrick Henry and George Mason expressed fears that the federal government would not help them defeat slave uprisings, and demanded that the Second Amendment be included so they could deal with such revolts themselves -- an acute concern in the slave-owning oligarchy of that time.
39% : The idea of the Second Amendment is, at its essence, for whites.

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